wefalck

Incidentally, at such small scales real wood often is not the best choice because the wood is too prominent and/or the wood is not stable enough at small sizes, particularly, if one does not have access to hardwood, such as boxwood. Therefore, it might be better to use metal or plastics and paint these to simulate wood. Hence, it may be harder, but it may be a good idea to cut the hearts in question from brass or aluminium sheet. Styrene might be too soft, but acrylic glass should work as well.

It would be the 1890s to early 1900s

The video-link does not seem to load for me ...

Pat, I am most impressed by the pivot-gun and the slides ! 3D-printing really seems to be the way forward. I am tempted to scrap my laser-cutting stuff. In our German forum there is a guy building the French BRETAGNE of 1855 in 1:75 (https://forum.arbeitskreis-historischer-schiffbau.de/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1548) at the moment and he got himself an SLA-printer. I have to show him your results.

Aren't the bolt around the missing ... duck and away ...

Well, people then may have had different risk perception ... Here is an image of a wood-cutter in his shop. These sphere were used by all sorts of professions. From: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/1903_Holzschneider.jpg Two such (solid) glass balls on stands are currently up for auction with Charles Miller in London: https://www.charlesmillerltd.com/auction/lot/322-two-19th-century-refracting-glass-balls/?lot=13664&so=4&st=refracting&sto=0&au=&ef=&et=&ic=False&sd=0&pp=48&pn=1&g=1

Workplace illumination was augmented by a sort of condensing lense, i.e. a glass sphere filled with sulfuric acid because of the high refractive index. Sometimes only water or a solid glass sphere was used, but the latter would have somewhat distorted the beam due to irregularities. These sphere were either placed in front of a window or a petroleum lamp. They were common in e.g. engravers' or clockmakers' workshops.

In my literature list I found the following: Anonym (1914): Nautical Terms - Motor Boats - Marine Gasoline Engines - Management of Marine Gasoline Engines - Motor-Boat Navigation - Motor-Boat Rules and Signals.- p., Scranton (International Textbook Company). The term 'naphta' seem to refer actually to different things and different distillation products in Russian today it means Diesel fuel. Over here in Europe marine engines running on heavier oils were preferred, as the low flame-point and the fact the vapours are heavier than air and can therefore collect in the bilge made the operation of 'naphta' motors quite hazardous in comparison. Correcting compass declination was a normal procedure before the gyro-compass was introduced. An area on most roadsteads was set aside for the purpose. The ship would turn a full circle and readings of the compass were taken together with readings of certain landmarks indicated for the purpose. On this basis the deviation of the compass from the actual magnetic North could be determined. Depending on the cargo of the ship, this procedure had to be repeated before any voyage. In the above case, corrections not only for declination, but also for inclination (the angle by which the field dips into the earth) deviations would be required, perhaps in function of the pitching and the rolling of the ship ...

For the moment, I had no need to use it for that purpose, but some years ago I bought a hot-air soldering station. The temperature can be regulated between 100°C and 450°C and the air-flow can also be regulated. It comes with different size nozzles and cost under 40€ including shipping from China. As heat is the main ingredient in plank-bending (the steam mainly serves as heat carrier ...) I would make myself a jig to fix the planks while cooling down. With the temperature and air-flow control and a small nozzle it may be even possible to heat the planks in situ on the model, but beware that you do not loosen previously glue planks. The in situ method might be useful for compound curves. If you want to know what is really possible in terms of wood-bending, look up Thonet-furniture (their famous No. 14 chair is the classical bistro-chair). They used mainly beech, I think, and massive cast-iron jigs to hold the shape, while the wood was cooling down: Also note the use of steel strips to distribute the bending forces and prevent kinking.

Yes, the sails look very good. Remind me, what you did in the end and what scale the model is in.

If you have an baking oven that can produce 800°C, you will be ok ... just joking. No, you would need a furnace or a blow-torch to heat the steel to a light red glow in order to obtain the oxidation layer. Most bearing balls are just polished, not chromed, but there are also hard-chromed varieties. The are made from steel alloys that give them high hardness, i.e. they contain chrome and/or nickel or other metals. Depending on the composition, there is a trade-off between corrosion reistance and hardness. Certain steel can be blackened by heating them with vegetable oils until the oil burns off. This has been largely replaced today by chemical blackening. Blackening (as blueing or browining) is a chemical reaction of the steel with different types of metal salts. In general, corrosion resistant steel are more difficult or impossible to blacken. Chrome-plated steel doesn't blacken.

Yep, looking better 👍 As I noted earlier, I think, playing with the different levels of sheen between the different materials adds visual interest and underlines the character of the material, particularly, when you simulate material with paint. In a 2D-painting you bring out these effects with high-lights and painted-in reflections, but on a 3D-object the view-point and illumination changes, plus the inherent reflectivity of the surfaces, so one can really only work with this reflectivity to create the feeling for the material. Figure-painters to some degree use both techniques, but it does not work so well on larger objects.

This is acrylics on polystyrene. No wood involved here ...

Sorry to say, but decks were always matt, as they were always bare, untreated wood that more or less regularly scrubbed with a piece of sandstone ('holy stone') .... but it is your choice.

The ship was apostrophed as 'motonavi per linee minori', which means 'motorships for minor shipping lines'. That 'motonavi' is plural may indicate that this plan pertain to a class of ships, rather to specific one.

Thanks for mentioning Kemmis' book, I wasn't aware of it. Just downloaded it now from GoogleBooks.

Bill97, the colour begins to look good ! I would have, however, sanded down the moulded-on wood structure - compare with the photographs.

Just beautiful ...

Well, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will get us all eventually

Valejo paints are really high quality. Originally, they were mainly catering for professional artists and still do. I never used solvent-based paints in my airbrush - too much messing around with organic solvents to get it really clean. I prefer to use the pre-thinned paints for use in the airbrush. No worries about getting the consistency right. I also use these for brush-washes. For the latter, of course, the 'normal' paint range could be used, but I just keep one range in stock. I found that these paints, when used for washes, behave very much like water-colours, but one has to be aware that they dry very fast and when dry cannot be redissolved (unlike enamels and freh oil-paint). This is both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I think more of advantage. You can work fast with acrylics, as there is virtually no drying time needed. You can apply one round of light washes, go for an espresso, and then can continue with the next wash without disturbing what you have done before. When using oils for this, as many do, you may have to wait for days in between applications, until the preceeding wash has sufficiently cured to be not redissolved by the next solvent-rich wash. BTW, in the second picture I think I used a light spray of satin acrylic varnish to fix somewhat the white salt-stains applied with white pastel, brushed into the corners etc.

I am using just their 'wood' colour as a basis and then apply washes of burnt umbra and flat black. And this is the copper-plated hull painted thirty years ago:

I would not use shellac and waxes on acrylics. Their thermal coefficient of expansion are different. In addition, shellac is too glossy - unlike on wood it cannot be rubbed down on paint. As for touching up: I avoid mixing paints, which removes the variable of getting the colour right. Of course, one would see touching up with a brush on a larger spray-painted surface. As I prefer to give my models a workaday look, the sprayed surfaces would be treated with washes (applied with a brush) of other paint anyway, so that touching up is not an issue.

But the flaking is mainly due to poor adherence to the surface. So that would not change with a an additional coating, just the flakes may be bigger. Obviously I don't have a life-time experience yet, let alone that of several life-times , but I have spray-painted with acrylics a metal hull back in 1989 or so and it still looks like on the first day, thirty years later.

To my knowledge the operational log-books have been lost, when the archives of the Admiralty were plundered in the days after the end of WW2. So we don't know, whether they ever practiced this settling on the mud-flats and what the experience with it was. The boats never saw real action, as they were decommissioned long before WW1. Half of them were stationed in the Baltic and other half in the North Sea, but they were effectively commissioned only for short periods of exercises. There are known sandbanks that would have been safer for the pupose than the actual mud-flats. I would have picked a sandbank close to a known tidal channel with the chance of a high current washing away the sand. In peace time these channels were and are marked with 'pricks', kind of brooms stuck upside-down into the banks of the channels. However, during war time all such marks were removed. So, in the Wadden Sea they would have certainly needed a pilot with pretty good local knowledge, probably a local fisherman. I gather, these 30.5 cm-guns were among the heaviest of their time, only surpassed, I think, by the 45 cm-guns of the Italian DUILIO and DANDOLO. I may mix this up, but I seem to remember that they built a special (still existing) steam-crane in Venice to insert these guns.

Acrylics typically take long to form a strong coating. There are two processes happening, the acrylics dispersion breaks down and the molecules begin to form an interlinked network and at the same time the 'solvent' evaporates, which becomes more difficult as the layer shrinks and the water molecules become trapped in it. Therefore, it may take several weeks before full strength is reached. It depends on the thickness of each layer that is sprayed on. Artist's acrylics (which includes modeller's acrylics) are made for decorative purposes, not for surface protection. Therefore, they may be not as scratch-proof as other types of acrylics. For a working model, I would be concerned about the paint being scratch-proof and adhering very well to the underlying surface. For a stationary model this is not that much an issue in my opinion. It really depends on how rough your handling is during the building process. Personally, I delay painting as much as possible, until all parts are made and fitted. Some modellers prefer a uniform sheen (usually matt or satin) all over their models. Again personally, I like to indicate different prototype materials by different levels of sheen (never really high gloss though). There may be a need to cover shiny spots of glue etc. over paint and in this case one may want to apply some varnish. In this case I would go for acrylics varnish, preferrably from the same manufacturer. Any unnecessary layer of paint might drown out surface details - airbrushed acrylics are really good to bring out surface detail, when sprayed on in thin layers. Acrylics are quite forgiving, when it comes to mixing layers of different types of paint, if one obeys to some basic rules: - spray thin layers to speed up curing - acrylics are pervious to water vapour, so water can evaporate through subsequent layers of acrylics; this may not be case when other types of paint are applied over acrylics, then water may become trapped and can cause problems with changing temperature. - obey the old painter's rule 'fat over lean' (as noted above already); acrylics molecules are hydrophilic and would not stick very well on 'fat' oil paints or enamels, which are typically lipophilic; oil paint or enamel over acrylics would also trap any residual water (see above). So in summary, unless you expect rough handling of your model during the construction or later, there is no need to 'seal' acrylics.